by Jack Foran

The title of the Artists & Models extravaganza this year is “Showoffs.” So what are the artists going to show off? Lots of music and dance and like entertainments onstage and off. Audience-interactive installations based on painting, sculpture, photography, and video. At one point in the evening, a giant unicorn piñata bust, and a midnight balloon drop. And the motif of one of the installations is, uh, mammaries, boobs. Another installation involves a Xerox machine, and audience volunteers will be invited to Xerox whatever body part they choose. You say that’s been done before. Yes, but as art? The mayhem fundraiser for Hallwalls will be held Saturday, September 29, 9pm-2am, at the Pierce Arrow Building (1685 Elmwood at Great Arrow Drive), a few blocks north of Buffalo State College.

by Gerald Mead

The world loves discovery stories and the art world has its share of them. In 1986, a series of more than 240 intimate portrait studies that famed regionalist painter Andrew Wyeth had done of a family friend over a period of 15 years came to light. Until their discovery—they were stored in the home of another friend of the artist—no one was aware of this extraordinary body of work that became know as “The Helga Pictures,” named after the model. They made international news, toured the nation and added an important new chapter to the artist’s oeuvre.Closer to home and in recent years, you’ve likely heard about a painting purported to be done by Michelangelo that has been quietly residing in a suburban Buffalo home for decades. For years, the owners affectionately referred to it as “The Mike.” Support for the authentication of that artwork is growing, as has the international discussion of the artwork and its significance.

by J. Tim Raymond

As David Letterman might say, let’s get this Proust business out of the way right now, A la recherché du temps perdu (A Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time) was written by the French novelist Marcel Proust and published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. His first-person narrative, in the cranky voice of a prissy insomniac is a fin de siècle saga delineating in exacting detail the decline of French aristocracy, the consolidation of the Third Republic, and the rise of the middle class following the Franco-Prussian war. But his writings, especially the conceit of casting back through the sieve of past events, have come to refine theories of narrative art and the role of the artist in society. Proust is a favored resource for conceptual artists whose work deals with issues of memory and the disparate fragments of autobiography.